In his research, Poell focuses on the societal consequences of the rise of digital platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, Airbnb and Uber. He has published extensively on social media and popular protests in Canada, Egypt, Tunisia, India and China. In recent years he has examined the development of the platform society.

As the new chair, Poell will focus on the digitisation of cultural institutions across the globe. He will do so in the light of the proliferation of data, the growing importance of AI, and the rise of major platform corporations. The professor will stimulate and develop new research on this transformation, which leads to a fundamental reorganization and rethinking of museums, libraries, and archives, as well as to creative and economic upheaval in the television, music, games, and news industries. Particular attention will be devoted to regional variations in how these changes unfold and what the political and cultural implications are.

About Thomas Poell

Poell has been affiliated with the UvA since 2009 as an associate professor of New Media and Digital Culture. He is co-director of the new UvA Research Priority Area Global Digital Cultures and is part of the Audiovisual Data and Media Studies team of the national infrastructural project CLARIAH. Poell has obtained various research grants, including an NWO Open Competition grant for the project The Platformization of the Global Sex Industry (2020-2025).

Poell is co-author of The Platform Society (Oxford University Press, 2018) with José van Dijck and Martijn de Waal, and of the forthcoming Platforms and Cultural Production (Polity, 2021) with David Nieborg and Brooke Erin Duffy. He is also editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage, 2018), Social Media Materialities and Protest (Routledge, 2018) and Global Cultures of Contestation (Palgrave, 2017).